Culture Collaboratory. Virtual Workspace for Interdisciplinary Collections Research and Management

»Culture Collaboratory« is a virtual workspace that supports interdisciplinary teams researching and managing collections of cultural artifacts. The software design follows the premise that whole collections and individual artifacts can only be fully understood by approaching them from multiple disciplinary angles and with a diverse range of methods.

Following this premise, the virtual workspace brings together researchers spanning disciplines from art and cultural history to conservation and material science. This setup allows to consider cultural artifacts in their multifaceted contexts including their historical function and meaning, the subject matter of visual art works, as well as their material properties, origin, and age. Integrating disciplinary research methods onto one shared interface, »Culture Collaboratory« helps researchers to analyze and interpret their findings and to create a holistic understanding of their research objects.

The aim of this project is to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary research and exchange that ultimately will broaden the understanding of and accessibility to our cultural heritage.

»Culture Collaboratory« grew out of the design research in the project »Transdisciplinary Indexing of Cultural-Historical Collections«